Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
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From: sa209@utb.shv.hb.se (Claes Andersson)
Subject: Re: "What is Life?"
Message-ID: <1995Feb16.171158.7765@gdunix.gd.chalmers.se>
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Date: Thu, 16 Feb 1995 23:31:29 GMT
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holtz@netcord.Eng.Sun.COM (Brian Holtz) wrote:
>In article <Pine.SUN.3.91.950209194448.6718I-100000@sun1>,
>Eugen Leitl  <ui22204@sunmail.lrz-muenchen.de> wrote:
>
>>The point is: the character sequence "life" is a label
>>assigned to a discernable group of space-time patterns
>>on personal whim. Everybody harbours his own opinion
>
>And yet, virtually everyone has the same "personal whim" to exclude
>fires/tornados and include viruses/Data.  Coincidence?  Or is "life"
>more definable than so many whiners on this newsgroup would like to
>pretend it is? :-)
>
>>and that should suffice. We all had come to recognize
>>there is something special about biological objects and
>>(recently) in some abstract kind of computer objects.
>
>It _does not_ "suffice", because I want to know exactly what kind of
>computer objects I need to build in order to synthesize life.  To my
>mind, systems like Conway's game of Life, genetic algorithms, and
>artificial social colonies are all lifelike and interesting, but none
>of them constitute synthetic life.

 If they don't, why do tornadoes?

/Claes


